30 April 2008

Last night my buddy Matt and I saw Electric Apricot - The Quest For Festeroo, at the Boulder Theatre and it was over the top cheesy and hilarious. In the vein similar to Spinal Tap, Les Claypool and his bandmates in the fictional band Electric Apricot are part of a mock documentary that pokes fun of the jam band scene. With their theme song titled 'Hey are you going to Burning Man,' the band gets a slot to play the Festeroo music festival on a some side stage called 'The Remnants.'

Everything about this movie was ridiculous, hence the release by National Lampoon's. The trailer gives you a good taste of what the movie is about. Pretty damn funny.

I find myself using Google Docs more and more all the time, so when there are new features, I'm quite interested. The latest features available are a presentation application and a Google-specific context menu.

I'm certainly not a fan of Powerpoint (I call it Powerpooper) as I tend to use Keynote anytime I can. But the ability to share a presentation with others, online, and have the capabilities of GoogleTalk is pretty powerful. This is clearly a shot across the bow of companies like Cisco's WebEx and ReadyTalk (though I've used ReadyTalk and it's much, much better than WebEx). You can even use the Presentations offline via Google Gears, nice!

28 April 2008

Also known as: Apache ActiveMQ, Camel, CXF and ServiceMix Meetup at JavaOne!

Come drink large amounts of beer, gorge on appetizers, talk about some great Apache projects and vomit profusely outside of the Zebulon Cafe - (Google Map) in San Francisco on Monday, May 5, 2008 from 6-9PM. Some of the really nice Apache committers will be there, too.

A big thanks to IONA Technologies for sponsoring the trough. We hope to see you outside the Zebulon at 2am making an ass of yourself :-).

24 April 2008

Just this week, Apache CXF graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top level project (TLP) at the Apache Software Foundation. CXF is now located at it's new URL - http://cxf.apache.org/.

This is a big deal for any Apache project, but especially for CXF which spent nearly 20 months there learning what is known as The Apache Way. The Apache Way is embodied in forming healthy, diverse, open communities at the ASF. This signifies that the project is now an official TLP at the ASF and can bear the official Apache brand.

A big congratulations to all those folks involved who worked so hard to make this happen!

16 April 2008

Have you ever gotten so used to certain key bindings that when they're suddenly not working you can't hardly contain your frustration? I just experienced this and thought that it might help someone else so I'm posting this info.

I spend a lot of time using GMail with Firefox. So much so, that I have gotten really used to all the key bindings for GMail, especially those from Better GMail 2 (if you haven't checked this out yet you should do it NOW!). Well today I just upgraded to a newer MacBook Pro so I had to install much of the software I use. Firefox and all of the plugins I use was on the list. After installing this and starting to use GMail, I could no longer use the tab key to get to the send button when composing a message. Hitting the tab key would just pop to the top of the page and place the cursor on the browser command line. After a few minutes of Googling and finding nothing, I remembered Better GMail 2.

After actually going into the Better GMail 2 prefs and selecting the options I like, I again had the functionality I expected from the tab key. Phew, I'm again sane.

After helping to achieve Java EE 5 certification for Apache Geronimo last summer, OpenEJB 3.0 has now been polished and is ready to rock with full support for EJB 3.0 and beyond.

My good friend David Blevins discusses the long and hard work that went into OpenEJB 3 in a blog entry he titled OpenEJB Revival(/me hear's the Allman Brothers song coming on ;-) ). What began as an extended caffeine induced hackathon wound up becoming a better, faster, lighter OpenEJB that has come to influence the EJB 3.1 spec with some pretty innovative features. OpenEJB even supports EJB descriptors from other Java EE containers! This makes using OpenEJB for testing your EJBs quite easy. It also dramatically reduces the pain involved in migrating away from other EJB containers toward OpenEJB.

Back when we founded Apache Geronimo, modularity was one of the biggest drivers so it was a no-brainer to select OpenEJB as the EJB container because of it's lightweight design and approach to tackling the EJB spec. Not only did this serve Geronimo very well, but it also proved without a doubt that OpenEJB is a worthy contender.

It looks like it's definitely time to integrate OpenEJB into Apache ServiceMix now!

11 April 2008

Today I spoke about Apache Camel at ApacheCon EU and my presentation named Taking Apache Camel For a Ride is now available. Based on feedback I heard, folks seemed to really enjoy it. I got some questions at the end of the session and even more after the fact just chatting with people.

It's the last day of ApacheCon EU 2008 here in Amsterdam, The Netherlands and it's been a good week. I enjoy coming to see friends who I only see once or twice a year and I love this area of Europe. Every time I come here I take home lots of tulips and calla lilies for the yard. It's rather late in the year to get bulbs here but I got lucky this time and found some at a flower market yesterday. Now I just need to make sure I an squeeze them into my suitcase. If so, maybe I'll try to get some more!

04 April 2008

ApacheCon EU 2008 is taking place next week in Amsterdam and both Guillaume and I are speaking. It looks like we'll also have a ServiceMix BOF on Wednesday night if you're interested. We hope to see some folks there!

I had the privilege of speaking at Javapolis 2007 back in December in Belgium and I ran into my friend Dion so we sat down and did a brief interview. For those that are interested, the interview is now available on Parleys.com.

02 April 2008

Last night I spoke about service-oriented integration with Apache ServiceMix at the Denver Open Source User's Group to a great crowd of folks. There was a lot of interest and a great reception by the group.